January 2025

“Save the Liverpool Women’s Hospital. No closure. No privatisation. No cuts. No merger. Reorganise the funding structures, not the hospital. Our babies and mothers, our sick women, deserve the very best”. We repeat this as the NHS governing body in Cheshire and Merseyside presents “new” proposals for Liverpool Women’s Hospital. We have more than eighty thousand people supporting our position on our petitions, online and on paper. The paper petition represents tens of thousands of face to face discussion with the public.

Our options for Liverpool Women’s Hospital

Liverpool Women’s Hospital is in the eye of two storms: the NHS as a whole and the National Maternity Crisis. We refer to corridor care, recurring winter crises, long waiting lists, too few doctors and too few beds, and significant waste from privatisation and a competitive rather than cooperative structure between hospitals. We also refer to the Maternity crisis, where yet another enquiry is underway and where the outcomes for women have gone back 20 years.

We demand that the Government and our local MPs Restore, Repair and Rebuild the  NHS.

Amid these storms, options for Liverpool Women’s Hospital’s future are being discussed at the ICB on 29th January 2026. They include options that have been presented before and met with huge opposition, as demonstrated by the popularity of our petition and demonstrations. There is no national background given on the NHS’s huge financial problems due to underfunding, nor on the national Maternity crisis. the iCB peprs can be found here

We demand candour about the financial pressure that led to the ICB proposals. We demand candour about the financial pressures that have led to so many Maternity units closing, or being merged into worse facilities in general and acute hospitals, further from the women they serve.

Option 6 in the ICB papers includes moving to some smaller rooms in the Royal instead of keeping the Maternity Gynaecology the NICU and other services in Crown Street site. As one staff member from the Royal said with heated emphasis, “There is no room for the Royal in the Royal”.

We do not oppose some complex operations happenning at Liverpool Royal Hospital. Such cooperation should have happened years ago.

We presented a detailed, referenced document to the ICB on the future of Liverpool Women’s Hospital, but it does not appear to have been used in any way. Our offers to meet with the working party have not been accepted, and the huge opposition has not been referred to in their published documents.

We are concerned at some of the wording in these proposals. For example”In the Equalities Impact Assessment (page 2 para 5 down) it says against all the options that the future model “is expected to include increased clinical presence across acute sites.” 

That phrase ‘expected’ is worrying as it seems to offer no guarantee that clinical support will be increased or even maintained, whatever the configuration .Yet poor maternity staffing acuity has been at the heart of Ockenden’s findings, the Amos interim review and the RCMs recent criticisms around understaffing. 

Also, on the consultation timelines being proposed before proceeding to a business case. Six weeks is being recommended. Given the report earlier concedes that the options, including the preferred option, will mean considerable changes to patient care, are complex in nature and have aroused widespread public and political interest, the consultation period proposed looks far too short and a longer period say 12 weeks might allow for example the various local councils scrutiny committees and public health to review (and also allow more interrogation of the options) 

Our alternative to the Options presented by the ICB.

• Keep Maternity, Gynaecology, the NICU, Genetics and Research, all the existing services, at Liverpool Women’s Hospital, at the Crown Street site. The experience of placing Maternity services in large acute hospitals has not been good. There is little evidence to support the practice, and much to disprove it, as shown in the current Maternity crisis and investigations into Maternity failures. Preserve Liverpool Women’s Hospital as a women’s service, for all our mothers, sisters, daughters, friends and lovers and every baby.
• Improve birth outcomes and experiences for women and babies.
• Improve post-natal care for all women.
• Improve the national funding structure for Maternity.
• Improve cooperation and joint working with other hospitals and other NHS providers.
• Improve funding to allow many more midwives.
• Improve funding to allow more medical staff for deteriorating patients.
• Employ more Gynaecology staff to address the long waiting lists, recognising this is a national and local issue. Stop outsourcing to cosmetic surgery hospitals.
• Provide free parking for staff.
• Provide a dedicated ambulance service between Liverpool hospitals to take pressure off the emergency service so badly hit in the (entirely avoidable) winter crisis.
• End outsourcing to private health companies.

 Below is the press statement we have sent out.

“The ICB Board at their meeting this Thursday are set to approve a report with several options for Liverpool Women’s Hospital, all of which will take services away from the hospital at the Crown St site.

The ICB favoured option is 2, which sets up some ‘high risk’  Maternity and gynaecological provision in the Royal.

Campaigners asked the ICB in formal questions.

Why has there been so much waiting and suffering in A and E, so much corridor care, so many long trolley waits for admission to the wards, all of which costs lives, pain and indignity at the Royal, if there is spare capacity in the hospital available for Maternity, neonatal, and gynaecology on Level 9?

Why is there no mention of the opposition to these plans from the community, trade unions, and campaign groups? We refer to this comment from the ICB’s own papers, 24 07 25.

Why are the financial (both capital and revenue problems) of LWH based on the issues with the Maternity Tariff, not mentioned in these options? How will any of this help the hospital’s financial problems? Will these options not increase the administrative load? Why are there no costings, and why is there no mention of the likelihood of gaining significant capital spending for these options? In earlier papers from the ICB and the hospital board, the additional cost of keeping the dedicated services on Crown Street was described as approximately £6million extra per year. The cost of a rebuild was defined as “up to £336 m-£549m”. We pointed out that it would take up to 91 years for rebuilding to be cheaper than providing safe care at Crown Street.

Why is this paper not set in the context of the national Maternity crises, when hospitals with some of the configurations described here have had terrible outcomes for babies and mothers? Professor Marian Knight, Director of the National Perinatal Epidemiology Unit and MBRRACE-UK maternal reporting lead, said: ‘These data show that the UK maternal death rate has returned to levels that we have not seen for the past 20 years.” Clearly,  the Maternity service has not been helped by moving Maternity into general and acute hospitals.

Why no mention of midwife staffing, nationally one of the major causes of stress, not specific to LWH on Crown St (see risk five below)? Liverpool Women’s can fill its permitted vacancies, but the staffing level for midwifery is inadequate.

Risks are asserted without proper evidence; the SLWH campaign  produced a detailed response to these assertions (see here)

Why was the Save Liverpool Hospital Campaign excluded from this round of consultations, especially after previous assurances that we would be involved?

We demand:

Full public funding for LWH on its Crown St Site

Urgent investment in Maternity care to improve staffing, and facilities and tackle inequality to make Maternity safer.

Much improved staffing and funding for Gynaecology

A publicly owned, publicly provided NHS, fully restored, repaired, and rebuilt.

Email; savelwh@outlook.com

Facebook: Save Liverpool Women’s Hospital

Twitter @lwh stays

Further Information

“Risk 5 – Women receiving care from women’s hospital services, their families, and the staff delivering care, may be more at risk of psychological harm due to the current configuration of services”  Stress levels are no different to the national average.

RCN press release April 2024 states that “24.5% of nursing staff are off work with stress, anxiety and depression. It is so widespread it accounts for 1 week of absence per year for every practising nurse.”  Therefore, LWH is in line with the national average. NHS sickness data shows average nurse took entire week off sick last year due to stress-related illness | Royal College of Nursing

Please support our campaign. Sign our petition. Write to your MP and your councillors.

Donate to our campaign.

A more detailed analysis of the situation after this ICB meeting will follow as soon as we have had time to discuss it.

We need the ICB to come clean with the public and the Government and state clearly that the collapse of the NHS is a result of chronic underfunding, creeping privatisation and outsourcing, which is sucking the lifeblood out of the NHS to no benefit to us, the patients, nor to the staff, nor to the economy, nor to our mothers and babies.